Imagine the worst
In the middle of a busy afternoon surgery I saw Elaine, a mother who had just had a minor car accident while doing the school run. Fortunately she was unhurt, but the car had suffered considerable damage and as her husband had only just bought it, all she could think of was what his reaction would be when she told him the news. She kept saying, This is the worst thing that could have happened today,' until I felt I had to intervene. I quietly pointed out that it was certainly highly irritating, but she was alive and well, as were her children. We wrote down a list of what else could have been worse that day, and after ten minutes I called a halt, or we would have writing all afternoon. What I had been able to do was show Elaine how easy it is to think something is worse than it really is, and how stressful such thoughts are. It probably made no difference to her husband's reaction that evening, but at least she had a sense of perspective about what had happened.
The huge majority of our fears and anxieties are in our heads and nowhere else. They have not happened and never will. They are often minor, but by constantly worrying about them we build them up so they become enormous problems. Will I lose my job in the future? Is the car going to break down on holiday? What if it rains on the day of the wedding? These may be worthy worries, but are actually trivial compared with what truly matters in our lives. Whenever I find myself worrying about what-ifs and maybes, I stop such stressful thinking by imagining the worst. What is the most terrible thing that can happen to me? The death of my wife and children - no question. I could probably add terminal illness and hideous wasting illnesses too, but you get my point. When you compare the daily minor anxieties that we all have with such thoughts, they melt away.

.Crisis Management
Yet what about the rare occasion when your worst fears actually come true? You are made redundant, or your child walks under a bus. How does this help at those times? The simple answer is it doesn't. What it does, though, is prove to you that you are getting through the worst thing that can happen to you. You are surviving. After this, everything else in your life will no doubt fall below this level of stress, and you will see it as such. People who have been through a trial of fire in their life will often say later at times of stress 'Oh, this is nothing compared to when . . .'What they are doing is using their worst fear as a benchmark to judge all the other stresses in their life. Whether these have happened or are in our imagination, the principle is the same. Imagine the worst, look at where your stress is in relation to it, and get your stress in perspective.
It is always worth remembering this joke: 'They said to me "Smile, it could get worse." So I smiled. And, yes, it got worse.'The real punchline should then be 'And I still survived.'
Most of our fears never happen - they are simply in our heads. The American writer Mark Twain said that he had lived through many awful things in his lifetime, but few of them had happened. To break these irrational fears, imagine the worst possible thing that could happen to you, and then think how you would deal with it. You can cope. As Susan Jeffers says,'Feel the fear. And do it anyway.'

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